State of the Cinema 2023

Friends, I’m writing this post on my phone throughout the day as I travel from Chennai, Tamil Nadu to Seminyak, Bali. This being the case, it is far more bare bones than usual, but I am stubbornly continuing this annual tradition in whatever form I can manage. Every year, a few people watch some very good movies that they otherwise wouldn’t have because of this post, and that’s important to me. I will be the only one providing comments this year (Angela has to work, Josh and Isabel are busy with their daughter’s birthday) but you’ll certainly be curious about one movie in particular that Josh and Isabel cited as a favorite. It is almost universally despised, so I asked them if they could briefly explain why it appeals to them so much. If you’re curious (after reading the lists), Josh pointed to Collin Brinkmann’s letterboxd review as the piece of writing about this film that most closely reflects their stance: https://boxd.it/5yVext

Regarding the slate of Oscar movies, I feel typically grouchy this year. I didn’t especially care for any of the ones I’ve seen. I haven’t gotten to Zone of Interest yet and I intend to give it a shot when I get home to my surround sound setup, but as of now, the only one that interests me at all is Killers of the Flower Moon. I’m ambivalent towards it: I do think that it reckons in interesting ways with America’s dark history and the difficulty of representing it in popular media, but I was disappointed by the way it handles the core marriage relationship. What’s most intriguing to me is the implication that the Gladstone and DiCaprio characters really do love each other (which makes this the second consecutive movie from Scorsese about a guy who kills everything he loves because his boss told him to). However, the movie doesn’t actually convince me that they love each other, nor does it give us an adequate view of their relationship. It’s a huge movie, and I kept wishing we could spend more of it in intimate spaces with just these two characters. While Gladstone’s performance has obvious merits, it doesn’t help much on this front, nor does DiCaprio’s.

I thought Anatomy of a Fall was okay, but a significant step down from Triet’s earlier work. I didn’t mind The Holdovers and I’m willing to give Oppenheimer another spin, but I strongly disliked Past Lives, Barbie, and Poor Things. I don’t begrudge anyone their pleasures, but these are just not at all for me.

There were, however, a few movies this year that I loved with my whole heart, and I’m glad to take this opportunity to celebrate them. I wish I had gotten to see the Wiseman in time for this post, but otherwise I did reasonably well. I very much enjoyed reading the lists included below from my wife Angela, my brother Josh, and my sister-in-law Isabel. Angela and I disagree as often as we agree, which always keeps things lively around the house.

Matt Strohl

  1. Close Your Eyes (Erice): A very engrossing mystery that gives way to haunted poetry. How much this affects you will depend a lot on your relationship with the medium, as it is at its core a movie about movies, but it made me weep like few other 21st century titles have. It has an immensity that barely seems possible anymore (and I don’t mean the kind of immensity that costs 250 million dollars to bring to the screen).

2. Ferrari (Mann): First of all, I am sick to death of hearing people complain about the accents. I don’t want to argue about it except to say that nothing could possibly matter less to me than whether accents in movies are realistic and I have trouble imaging what it would be like to watch THIS incredible film and have THAT be your takeaway. Far from a conventional biopic (thank god), this is Michael Mann’s Red Line 7000. It studies the masculine-coded drive to live in the constant company of death, the feminine-coded civilizing influence, and the tragedy that follows from their synthesis. At the same time, it is an uneasy self-portrait of Mann as the commendatore. It’s a rich and complex film that I expect will continue to unfold for me through repeated viewings across many years, and it deserves a much more thoughtful reception than it’s generally gotten.

3. The Plains (Easteal): It is essentially three hours of commuting in Melbourne rush hour traffic, but it contains almost no dead time. There is always a phone call being made or a conversation happening with a younger colleague who’s along for the ride, and through these conversations the film develops a harrowing rumination on mortality and the transience of human life. Eventualities that seem like they’re on an impossibly distant horizon come and pass with disarming speed as our lives slip through our fingers. I walked away from this utterly devastated.

4. Diary of a Fleeting Affair (Mouret): Watch this! It’s a treat, like every Mouret movie. It does what it says on the tin: it gives us a distilled retelling of a fleeting affair. It’s mostly just two great actors walking and talking, with the camera always placed somewhere interesting. It builds more impact than you might expect, and the final moments took my breath away.

5. Afire (Petzold): It’s a wonder how this manages at once to be so light on its feet and so apocalyptic. It’s a sly film that plays as a very funny comedy of embarrassment while developing something far more disconcerting beneath its surface through the centering of an unreliable perspective.

6. Trenque Lauquen (Citarella): Laura Citarella returns to her interest in storytelling as a form of investigation. Multiple genres flow together into a single narrative that spirals into a seductively elusive abyss while retaining a legible emotional arc. I really enjoyed spending a long afternoon lost in this film’s strange world.

7. May December (Haynes): I slapped my forehead many times over the way the discourse about this movie devolved into platitudes about who has the right to tell whose story and what artists owe to their subjects. It seemed like a lot of people would have preferred to see the movie that is being made by the characters in May December. Haynes’ film is not primarily the story of a teacher who had sex with her underage student and then had children with him and married him. It’s first and foremost a method acting procedural, and the way it implicates us in the actress’ point of view and invites us to partake of its many sleazy pleasures exposes the prurient underbelly of our obsession with such stories (and their authentic representation).


8. Padre Pio (Ferrara): Not a friendly or easy to like film, but I admire its jagged provocations. It is less a work of hagiography and more of an indictment of the church’s role in the rise of fascism in Italy. It also has a self-reflexive dimension that I find at once troubling and compelling with the casting of Shia LaBeouf as a penitent reckoning with his own transparent hypocrisy.

9. Human Flowers of Flesh (Wittmann): On the surface, it’s a sensory immersion in the Mediterranean, but it examines the way its images and sounds are inflected by the history of the zone and the tradition of storytelling that stretches from The Odyssey to Beau Travail. For me, intoxicating and fascinating.

10. The Covenant (Ritchie): Centered on two great performances from Dar Salim and Jake Gyllenhaal, this is one hell of a movie about honor and courage and living by a code, but it’s also a vigorous indictment of America’s refusal to cash the checks it’s written in the Middle East. Ritchie’s heavy use of drone photography really makes the terrain come alive.

HM – The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (Friedkin), Fallen Leaves (Kaurismäki), Copenhagen Cowboy (Refn), Shin Kamen Rider (Anno), The White Storm 3: Heaven or Hell (Yau).

Angela Shope

  1. Napoleon (Scott)
  2. Killers of the Flower Moon (Scorsese)
  3. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (Wrench)
  4. Close Your Eyes (Erice)
  5. Afire (Petzold)
  6. Fallen Leaves (Kaurismäki)
  7. Anatomy of a Fall (Triet)
  8. Oppenheimer (Nolan)
  9. John Wick: Chapter 4 (Stahelski)
  10. Trenque Lauquen (Citarella)

Josh Strohl

  1. Afire (Petzold)
  2. Ferrari (Mann)
  3. Close Your Eyes (Erice)
  4. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (Friedkin)
  5. The Boy and the Heron (Miyazaki)
  6. Asteroid City (Anderson)
  7. Fallen Leaves (Kaurismäki)
  8. May December (Haynes)
  9. Priscilla (Coppola)
  10. Menus Plaisirs – Les Troisgros (Wiseman)

HM – Pacifiction (Serra), Beau is Afraid (Aster), Napoleon (Scott), Killers of the Flower Moon (Scorsese), R.M.N. (Mungiu), Marlowe (Jordan), Master Gardener (Schrader), The Exorcist: Believer (Green), Showing Up (Reichardt), Knock On The Cabin (Shyamalan)

Isabel Strohl

  1. Afire (Petzold)
  2. The Boy and the Heron (Miyazaki)
  3. Asteroid City (Anderson)
  4. Beau is Afraid (Aster)
  5. Ferrari (Mann)
  6. Killers of the Flower Moon (Scorsese)
  7. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (Friedkin)
  8. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.(Craig)
  9. The Iron Claw (Durgin)
  10. The Exorcist: Believer (Green)

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